Fault Lines

Artists often test boundaries. Revealing, replotting, and resolving, they look to new ways of experiencing and interpreting colour, form, materials, and space. The artists in this exhibition redefine the limits of the canvas and complicate the compositional field – innovations that reconceptualise the artistic potential of materials. Canvas need not be centre stage, nor designated as merely a support or base; in these works, the fault lines between painting and sculpture collide, and odes to architecture enliven and extend the field of vision.

Gretchen Albrecht’s lunette or hemisphere adorns the wall as Philippa Blair’s canvas-as-cloak might adorn a person’s frame. Don Driver and Ralph Hotere reassemble industrial and agricultural debris and processes, as Philip Trusttum collages canvas with symbols of the labourer. Oliver Perkins and Julian Dashper circumvent conventions of the painted surface and its edges, while Dan Arps and Don Peebles interact with the wall’s plane. These two works offer up the tangibility of relief sculpture as Arps’s trompe l’oeil shifts between two and three-dimensionality, while Peebles’s boards protrude into the onlooker’s space.

These artists are bound together by a will to intercept our assumptions about the distinctions between and definitions of the wall, surface, and frame. As viewers, we are invited to share in the artists’ exploration of the support, backdrop, or base as an interface – a site for mapping and connecting the artworks’ constituent parts. This interconnectivity enables us to track the dynamic sight lines from the artists’ conceptual design through to the viewing experience.